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April 16, 2007“‘We probably could have saved ourselves,but we were too damned lazy to try very hard …AND TOO DAMNED CHEAP,”he once suggested carving into a wall on the Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures,” said Reuters of the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.. Ain’t it the truth. Or is it? BLOGGERS! GET YOUR READERS TO SEE THE TRUTH!I clicked on the Downloads link on www.climatecrisis.net, the website for the film “An Inconvenient Truth,” and that was the first item. So I spent Step It Up Day writing this column. Step It Up wants Congress to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. There were scheduled activities in all 50 states at more than 1400 locales—a good sign that global warming consciousness is rising. Here’s hoping it rises faster than the emissions now choking our atmosphere. GLOBAL WARMING: The threat. The challenge. The opportunity.California is the 12th biggest generator of CO2 in the world. California of course is huge, and has a population of more than 36,000,000 (US Census, 2005). The population increased by 6.7% between 2000 and 2005, and The Bureau projects more than 38,000,000 by 2010. 11th District Congressman Jerry McNerny anticipates 1.7 million new cars every year in California. At this time, he says, emissions here are still going up. LOCAL ACTION, GLOBAL IMPACTThe other night I went to a gratifyingly well-attended symposium “From Global Predictions to Local Action,” presented by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the Palace of Fine Arts. The theater is huge and I’d say it was three quarters full. In the audience, brainpower was radiating from people’s heads like heat waves. On stage they were all out on fire, seven of the best brains in all the world on the panel, moderated by Assemblyman Ira Ruskin (Chair of the Budget Subcommittee of Natural Resources, co-author of AB32, the California Global Solutions Act of 2006, mandating that California reduce carbon emissions by 25% to 1990 levels by 2020) and Congressman McNerney (he defeated Richard Pombo), appointed by Pelosi to the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming (the guy has a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Engineering). MCNERNEY QUOTED REAGANas saying, when signing the Rekjavik International Treaty, that he wished we would be invaded by aliens from outer space, so we would be forced to cooperate across national boundaries. O-kay. We can only hope that when they get here they will not find Vonnegut’s message etched in the Canyon. Vonnegut doesn’t so much mind Reagan’s idea. “I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable.” The charge of the Select Committee is not policy-making, but to publicize global warming and establish relationships with foreign countries so that advances made in the US can be spread throughout developing countries. Al Gore took the issue to the 50-yard line, McNerney said; it is up to the rest of us to get it to the goal line. COOPERATING ACROSS NATIONAL BOUNDARIESis indeed the only way to attack the problem of global warming; to state the obvious, solving a global problem requires global participation. That’s why I left the discussion with equal parts hope and dread. There are big brains out there who know the science and the answers, and they’re hard at work on this. We already have the knowledge. But three things stand between developing solutions and realizing them—1) politics, that is, legislating and regulating the solutions; 2) money—needed to fund implementation of the legislation; and 3) us—the need for individual participation. Nos. 1 and 2 will happen, slowly; it’s No. 3 I’m worried about. We all know how great the peoples of the world are at cooperating with each other. That’s why there have never been any wars. MCNERNEY’S CONGRESSIONAL WEBSITEclaims that “during his career in wind energy, [his] work contributed to saving the equivalent of approximately 30 million barrels of oil, or 8.3 million tons of carbon dioxide.” We can’t all make such a dramatic impact, but the choices I alone have made save 4.4 tons of CO2 a year. I calculated my “carbon footprint” atwww.climatecrisis.net/takeaction/carboncalculator/. The national average is 7.5 tons of CO2 per person per year—my result, including two long round-trip airline flights per year—was called “much smaller than average”—3.1. WHY AND HOW?Two biggies: I don’t drive a car, and I don’t use my heat. PGE shut my furnace down because of some failsafe problem, I put off getting it fixed, and then I discovered I didn’t really need it. My flat stays temperate enough, or tolerable enough, to get by without. So why spend the energy or the money. I have a gas stove but rarely cook, and keep lights on only in the room I’m in. I also turn off the power strips to my electronics when not in use. My January PGE bill was $29.17. Not everyone can make those kinds of choices, and wouldn’t if they could. A great many people depend on cars for their work, and would die of exposure without heat, but the least we can do, for those who always do the least they can, is reduce our carbon footprint by switching out our incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents. At least that doesn’t involve any sacrifice, like driving less. My flat alone requires 31 bulbs, and they use 60% less energy. Walk to the hardware store to buy them. If you and all other American families do, we’ll save 90 billion pounds of CO2 a year. I REALLY WISH TO BE WRONGOne of the symposium panelists was Dr. Inez Fung, of the Department of Atmospheric Science and UC Berkeley Institute for the Environment, the author of the amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court for CO2 to be regulated by the EPA in Massachusetts v. EPA. The EPA apparently doesn’t want anything to do with automotive carbon emissions, but they lost and now the ball’s in their court. They have to do it or present a reason why not that the judges will find reasonable, as they rejected those presented at trial. For Dr. Fung it was a “bitter victory,” because “the news is not good. I really wish to be wrong.” John Timmer of www.arstechnica.com said the EPA “could essentially punt this issue to the next administration by devising a sufficiently drawn-out process for developing regulations. In the end, the fate of EPA carbon regulations, much like the fate of the emissions caps being discussed in Congress, are likely to depend primarily upon the results of the next presidential election.” There was a surprise heckler in the audience interrupting the nuclear energy discussion by talking loudly over the speakers and before being evicted added a final thought, “And Al Gore’s a racist!” AL GOREgrew up on a tobacco farm. Summers he found it fun to join in on the harvest with the workers. But later in life, his beloved sister died of lung cancer from smoking since her teen years. In “An Inconvenient Truth,” he reveals, “The idea that we had been part of that economic pattern that produced the cigarettes that produced the cancer, it was so painful on so many levels. My father, he had grown tobacco all his life. He stopped. Whatever explanation that seemed to make sense in the past, just didn’t cut it any more. He stopped it. It’s just human nature to take time to connect the dots…I know that. But I also know that there can be a day of reckoning when you wish you had connected the dots more quickly.” It’s the same situation with global warming. William Arnold of the Seattle Post Intelligencer said the film “draws its special power from the fact that we are both the villains and the victims of the story.” That’s a pretty potent conflict. But that day of reckoning has come for us as a species. “IT’S IMPORTANT TO RESCUE THE FROG.”There’s an animated feature in the film showing that a frog which jumps into boiling water will jump right out again because the danger is immediate—but if it jumps into lukewarm water put on to boil, it will continue to sit there and not react as the temperature continues to rise, and will boil to death unless someone rescues it. “OUR COLLECTIVE NERVOUS SYSTEMis like that frog’s nervous system. It takes a sudden jolt sometime before we become aware of a danger—if it seems gradual, even if it really is happening quickly, we’re capable of just sitting there and not responding and not reacting. It’s important to rescue the frog.” The title for the film came about when its director Davis Guggenheim asked Gore, “Al, why is it so hard for us to understand this? Why, when the writing is on the wall, do we want to pretend it’s not there?” And Gore replied, “It’s inconvenient. For those of us who drive cars every day, for those of us who use electricity, for companies who profit on this, it’s an inconvenient truth.” And there’s the rub. Will people be willing to inconvenience themselves—all over the world—to change their ways? “Are we capable of doing great things even though they are difficult?” asks Gore. “Are we capable of rising above ourselves and above history?” Gore says yes, citing the moon mission, the fall of Communism, solving the problem of the hole in the ozone layer, and other moments of us “at our best.” WHAT’S DON IMUS GOT TO DO WITH IT?He’s us at our worst moments—or at least himself at his own. Contemplating the Don Imus melodrama, I took another look at “Gentleman’s Agreement,” the landmark film exploring and exploding anti-Semitism, with Gregory Peck pretending to be Jewish for eight weeks so he could write a magazine series about what it feels like to be discriminated against. Actually I found it relevant to the global warming situation as well. People are prejudiced against the idea that their actions can cause anything or solve anything. People shun this idea. They don’t want to give it up because it shields them from responsibility and accountability. People have got to take off their blinders, see it for what it is—denial—and act accordingly. Will they? Will the majority of people make matters worse, or will we rise above ourselves and do something great? There’s a fabulous scene where Gregory Peck comes home, and with his tilted hat, his smoking cigarette and long dark suit, leans his tall, lanky frame casually against the door jamb, putting one foot forward as a gesture of casual confrontation, because he has walked in on his mother reading the article he was working on. Later she reads him a portion she says his father would have liked: “THOSE PATIENT, STUBBORN MENwho argued and wrote and fought…came up with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They knew that the tree is known by its fruit, and that injustice corrupts the tree, and its fruit withers and shrivels and falls at last to that dark ground of history where other great hopes have rotted and died. For equality and freedom still remain the only hope for wholeness and soundness, in a man or in a nation.” Or a world. “NOT ENOUGH OF US REALIZE IT,”says Peck, “time is getting short. Not enough people and the time’s running out.” “You mean Kathy?” asks his mother. “Not just Kathy.” says Peck, “All the Kathys, everywhere.” “THE WORLD IS STIRRINGin very strange ways,” his mother goes on. Maybe this is the century for it, maybe that’s why it’s so troubled. Other centuries had their driving forces, what will ours have been when men look far back to it one day? Maybe it won’t be the American Century after all, or the Russian Century or the Atomic Century. Wouldn’t it be wonderful…if it turned out to be Everybody’s Century, and people all over the world—free people—found a way to live together.” Live together and act together. I have a wish for our young century. I wish that it grow to become Everybody’s Century, yours and mine, during which we find a way to work, if not live, together. Peck’s friend Celeste Holmes chimes in…”they want you and Uncle John to stand up and yell and take sides and fight. But do they fight? Oh, no. Kathy and Harry and Jane and all of them…they haven’t got the guts to take the step from talking to action, one little action on one little front. Sure, I know it’s not the whole answer, but it’s got to start somewhere, and it’s got to be with action—not pamphlets…it’s gotta be with people—nice people, rich people, poor people, big and little people—and it’s gotta be quick.” PEOPLE!We have had our great big wake-up call and more. Pick your jolt: - Polar bears drowning - “Enormous” numbers of new coal-fired generating plants being built in China “because they are so profitable” - The melting of Greenland or the polar ice cap raising sea levels by 20 ft. and drowning major cities around the world, including much of the Bay Area - Millions of species driven to extinction by 2050 - No more snows of Kilimanjaro by 2017 - Seeing “An Inconvenient Truth” GET WITH THE PROGRAM!Equality and freedom and cooperation are our only hope. When great numbers of people on Earth recognize we are all in the same boat on the same planet, maybe a gradual dawn will rise when everyone realizes—it’s Everybody’s Century—this is the century for it, and our driving force will be to save our planet for the next century and the next. Don Imus got a great big wake-up call. And maybe it was his day of reckoning. Perhaps he needed this to open his eyes to what racism really is—nasty, mean assumptions about how certain people behave and look and talk and pray, and pre-judging them on those qualities alone, not the substance of the individual. To be so judged is demoralizing and debasing. Maybe Don Imus is one person moving on one front, who now realizes his actions and words have consequences, and the whole world is watching him. It might be the best thing that will ever happen to him, to be unceremoniously fired. He’s both a racist and a philanthropist—lover of man—perhaps his personal behavior will now reflect that. It’s somewhere to start. IF PEOPLE WORK TOGETHERto tackle a common crisis with a common goal, maybe prejudices will fall away like the Berlin Wall, as will the physical and emotional and cultural walls that hold us all apart. We will see each other not as a member of the Asian or Caucasian race, but of the human race, struggling to survive on this planet we’ve exploited, all trying to do the right thing. Maybe this is the century for people to drop their bigoted assumptions, and accept and respect those different from us. Maybe Vonnegut’s “aliens” have already arrived. Maybe the alien is global warming. But when it arrived at the Grand Canyon…the message was not yet etched. What if the “writing on the wall” instead said: “We saved ourselves, because we were not lazy or cheap. We knew the value of our planet, of the world’s species, the world’s habitats, all the people who live on it, of the future, of life. We did not end up withered and shriveled on that dark ground of history where other great hopes have rotted and died.” And we said to the alien, “We will fight you across national boundaries, and we will shut you down.” And with a great big jolt, the Alien crash-landed at the bottom of the Canyon, withered, shriveled, and no longer a threat. And when people look far back on Everybody’s Century someday, they’ll say, oh, yes—that was the century that brought us world peace. Pipe dream or vision? It’s up to you. Cue music.
Our future–or is it? ------------------------------------------------------------ The garden of peace
If you think you need a car to get around, think different copyright Alexandra Jones 2007 |
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